In the past fifty years, the high incidence of illiteracy in schools and the overall inadequacy of reading performance on standardized tests has prompted additional funding by both the federal and state governments for helping children who possess severe reading disabilities in the United States. Research studies by the U.S. Office of Education, research groups, and others estimate that more than twenty million students suffer from dyslexia and related reading disorders. Dyslexia is most commonly defined as a severe reading disability based on neuropsychological immaturity or dysfunction which interferes with the integration of perceptual and linguistic symbols. While not all disabled readers qualify as being dyslexic by this definition, the incidence of severe reading disabilities is common in most U.S. schools today.
One problem that many dyslexics and other disabled readers commonly experience is the inability to decode unfamiliar words. The abstract nature of alphabetic systems imposes large demands on individuals learning to read. In comparison to other languages, where pictures or written symbols correspond to specific ideas or concepts, alphabetic systems have letters, or graphemes, which have no meaning themselves. Instead, the letters represent speech sounds, or phonemes, which possess meaning only when blended together. As a result, the reading process becomes slower, less accurate, less fluent, and more stressful for the reader. Repeated unsuccessful decoding attempts may directly affect the level of comprehension as well.
The reading process for disabled readers is a difficult task since it involves the processing and integration of both visual and auditory information or stimuli. Many disabled readers are able to recall, by name, the majority of letters in the alphabet, but become confused when sounds are assigned to these letters. In the English alphabet, an individual letter is not assigned to consistently represent one distinct vowel sound. The letter "a", for example, can represent a variety of sounds (i.e., "cat", "cake", "call", "card"). Due to these inherent inconsistencies in the spelling and pronunciation of the English language, most disabled readers disregard the auditory processing component, and tend to rely solely upon the visual stimuli. In effect, they learn to visually memorize as many words as possible.
Even though many disabled readers are able to function at a low level by memorizing a number of high frequency words, the problem of decoding unfamiliar, multi-syllabic words still remains a barrier. For most disabled readers, the goal of ever reading a newspaper will never become a reality unless effective intervention occurs.
Several methods have been devised to help disabled readers learn unfamiliar words. U.S. Pat. No. 146,631 to Allen describes a technique for indicating the syllables of a word by placing a mark under or over the final letter of each syllable. Accented syllables are indicated in the word by using a mark which is different than the syllabication mark. This method, however, is confusing because the separation of syllables is not made visually clear to the reader. Additionally, no effort is made to mark or indicate the location of vowels within the syllables.
Another reading instruction method is described in U.S. Pat. No. 4,655,713 to Weiss. In this method, letters which initiate a distinctive sound are contrasted within the word by a difference in color, intensity, or type style. The letters which have no distinctive sound are marked with non-pictorial, short stroke symbols or superscript letters to indicate their proper pronunciation. Syllables may be denoted by a small dot inserted in between letters without providing additional spacing. This method is quite complicated because the reader must memorize new symbols, as well as their associated sounds, in addition to the regular alphabet. The reader may also become excessively dependent on the short stroke symbols for proper pronunciation, making the transition to normal reading materials difficult.
U.S. Pat. No. 4,490,118 to Stewart discloses a syllable pattern recognition method which classifies syllables in the English language into six different vowel and consonant combinations. These vowel-consonant combinations are printed on separate cards. During instruction, a multi-syllabic word is divided into syllables with each syllable printed on a separate card. The student is instructed to look at each syllable of the word and select the card which corresponds in letter pattern with the syllable of that word. This method, however, is not easily adaptable for use in printed text or private study.